Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Diversity + Proximity Still Equals War

“Release the river!” – The Two Towers

I was thinking about rivers the other day, and realized the reason the Mississippi runs through St. Louis is that if it walked, it would get stabbed.

I kid. But I was thinking about rivers as a metaphor. If I dump a gallon of water on the ground in Modern Mayberry, and it hits the stream, I’m not sure about what path it will take, exactly.

Tributaries wander. The location of each little creek and drainage ditch may change. Hell, the Mighty Mississippi even wanders from time to time, but if my gallon of water hits it, regardless of the path, the destination of that water is the ocean.

Some things are like that: near certainties, it’s just the “how we get there” changes.

Today, let’s take the big Kahuna, population.

The highest fertility peoples in the world are in Sub-Saharan Africa and to a lesser extent Pakistan and Afghanistan. India was above replacement but is slightly below right now using 2024 data. However, India is leading the people numbers, so we’ll keep them in.

These are also some of the least intellectually gifted people on the planet, coming from many countries where the average IQ is so low that half or more of the population would be considered “borderline impaired”. Given the relatively low IQ, it’s not surprising that these areas are also the least educated, least well-governed, and poorest countries in the world, often starving themselves through nearly comical mismanagement of the local resources which could give them amazing wealth and prosperity if managed with just a modicum of thought.

Decolonizing these areas was not a kindness, but sometimes you get what you asked for, and they certainly did, good and hard. Soon enough, there will be billions of Sub-Saharan Africans.

Where is this surplus of people going to go?

Unlike my metaphorical gallon of water, they’re not going to line up two-by-two and march into the ocean. The choices then, are simple. They either stay in the same country and kill and eat each other, or they migrate by the hundreds of millions to places where they can descend like locusts and turn that location into a Mad Max wasteland as well.

Where? They really have only one logical destination.

Europe. And, America a little, but more on that below.

Graph: Steve Sailer

This, of course, will destroy Western Civilization in Europe. From the outward appearances right now, it looks like there are about sixty people on the whole continent that are opposed to this invasion enough to do something to stop it, and they’re mainly Irish.

Matt Bracken notes that just a few shipping containers of AK-47s and there are divisions of these “migrants” ready to take over country after country in Europe, far outnumbering the police, army, and armed citizenry. These men are all over, being paid to be there so Germans and English men and women can have the opportunity to work long hours to support the invaders. The irony is that often the invaders have better food and lodging than the actual workers that support them.

The GloboLeftElite is thrilled about this, because, hey, quarterly profits will go through the roof AND we’ll get rid of the Germans, French, English, and Irish in a couple of generations.

To the GloboLeftElite, these invaders are the real Europeans, or at least the “Europeans” they want.

I cannot tell you exactly which European capital will fall first, or if the Indians and Pakistanis will have to partition London so they don’t end up fighting each other. But I can say that this collapse into a balkanized group of tribal fiefdoms from the Atlantic to the Danube is all but assured.

I said I’d get back to America, so let’s pick up that tributary.

Tens of millions, at minimum, will try to make it to the United States. The Democrats, Chamber of Commerce Republicans, and the Libertarian (capital L) types will want to let them in as fast as they can get here. Why? In order: reliable votes for a route to permanent power, cheap labor, and . . . “Am I being detained?” I guess.

It is much tougher physically to get to the United States directly. So, they’ll use Canada, which is helpfully importing infinity Indians right now, and is trying to become an associate member of the EU because, well, Trump. If they join the EU as an associate member, can anyone in Europe can wander on over any time, just like those “refugees in fear for their lives” who regularly vacation in the countries that they’re so afraid of? Time will tell, but you know the answer.

Getting to North America is also more expensive, but that seems to only be a moderate impediment with NGO after NGO (funded by US government payments) bringing them here, and often funding their transport into the United States. Many of these groups hate the United States, so certainly their intent in giving us blessing of diversity is benign, right?

While less certain than the fate of Europe, I fully expect the next Democratic administration, if not the next Republican administration, to invite in millions like Biden did, and work to get them either citizenship or on the voting rolls as soon as possible. This is inevitable.

The balkanization of the United States, absent a significant change, likewise seems to be inevitable. The major difference to Europe is that Americans are armed in impressive numbers with my guess being that there are two guns for every person in the country, at minimum. I suspect there are many, many more since official estimates are based on weapons produced for private use since 1990. A few containers of AK-47s dropped to illegal aliens would cause havoc in the United States, but wouldn’t result in the nearly immediate surrender you’d see in, say, France or England.

Whereas the final end of the conflict in Europe seems to be certain, the certainty of what will happen in the United States is not the ultimate outcome, but that there will be massive civil unrest.

Why?

As the great Chateau Heartiste put forward, “Diversity + Proximity = War” and the millions of diversity imported into the country make widespread armed conflict inevitable. Think the moslems in Dearborn, Michigan are going to try to become Americans, or keep pelting peaceful Christians with stones and trying to kill them?

Yeah, they’re going to keep trying to kill them as they take over city after city. Diversity, I guess, is a stabbing.

I get the sense, though, that Americans are going to fight back at some point, and unlike Europeans, have the means to do so.

I had intended to tackle a whole host of trends, but here we are. Just one.

I’ll toss in this St. Thomas Aquinas quote on immigration. A saint outranks a pope, right?

For they were not at once admitted to citizenship: just as it was law with some nations that no one was deemed a citizen except after two or three generations, as the Philosopher Aristotle says. The reason for this was that if foreigners were allowed to meddle with the affairs of a nation as soon as they settled down in its midst, many dangers might occur, since the foreigners, not yet having the common good firmly at heart, might attempt something hurtful to the people.

We can wish all we want, but the water will find the ocean. At least in the United States, there is still some ability to plot its course.

The Weekend Ate My Homework

A long but fun weekend, what you get is . . . memes! Enjoy. Back to the usual shenanigans on Wednesday.

21 Thoughts Occurring Around The Start Of Fall

Well, well, you took my advice about theatricality a bit literally.” – Batman Begins

I always found studying math was the best workout, since there is strength in numbers. (all memes as-found)

Here are some notes that I wrote, mainly for nobody but me. Then I thought, hey, why not share them? So, here you have it. The list is in no particular order. Your mileage may vary.

Personal responsibility and discipline lead to freedom. I need to understand that decisions belong to me. I stand without fear because this comes internally, not externally. My internal focus is on virtue, and making choices that celebrate Truth, Beauty, and Goodness.

The outcome of virtuous acts is sometimes failure.

I tried opening a packet of tuna to make a tuna fish sandwich, but it didn’t look like there was enough tuna in the bowl, so I opened another packet. Then? Too much tuna, enough for four sandwiches. This is why I only have tuna sandwiches every four years.

What’s the least diverse profession in the United States? Chief Diversity Officer.

I deal with failure in a game where I put myself out and did all I could. It is what it is. An honorable defeat is better than a dishonorable surrender, but an honorable victory is better than both.

Following someone else’s rules isn’t the basis of honor. Fighting fair when they won’t fight fair isn’t the basis of honor, either.

Realize that defeat is sometimes hidden victory, and victory is sometimes hidden defeat and the biggest decider is timescale.

I realize that other cultures put their own people first, and it does my children no good for me to put other cultures and their people as equal to ours.

If you will only hire an indigenous woman as a housekeeper, is that ethnic cleansing?

Responsibility leads to responsibility. This is good, in tough times and in good times. There is no time while I’m still breathing to lay down my burden.

The system is broken. I fight to make it better. I will not fix it by myself, and it may not ever be perfect. Yet, I will not stop.

No Chinese guy ever called me a racist. Except that one.

I will make audacious goals, because more often than not if I exercise enough discipline and effort, I will meet those goals. Aiming low does me no good.

Challenge is what gives us the opportunity to be strong, wise, and virtuous. Understanding that there is some part of me that is eternal is enough to overcome the fear of the ephemeral.

Am I ever ready? No. The best I can do is the to face the future with bravery and open eyes, knowing that the challenges I face may be more difficult than any I have ever faced in my life.

I don’t know how you feel about toilet graffiti, but I just signed a partition.

There is only one way: forward. There is no return or retreat, time is an unforgiving arrow that moves, leaving the past as a dead and inaccessible country with the exception of the echoes I have in memory, writing, art, and recordings. Living in the past is living with ghosts, as it is dead and barren.

The past exists to transform me. I am where I am, and I am who I am because of my successes and failures. To spend time on regret is a waste. To feel despair because of what I am not is a temptation put forward by Evil. I cannot live a life that never was, even if I wish it so.

Dexter was often the good guy.

My favorite time of the year is when the air conditioner isn’t running, as long as I don’t need the air conditioner to be running, and then it’s my least favorite time of the year. When the machines finally rise against us, I’m going to really regret having to kill my air conditioner.

In one sense, we are all on our own islands, alone. It is only by talking and listening and doing that one can know another. The way that minds speak to each other through time and space is by writing and reading. Maybe in the future it’ll only be memes.

Our nation is not ours, it was given to us in trust by our ancestors for their grandchildren. To give it away to others is thoughtless theft.

Geography is important to making a people. Geography is important to controlling the world. Me? Based on geography, I fully support the obliteration of Iran. (pic related)

Psst, I hear they have nuclear weapons!

Maybe it was a bad idea to let soulless corporations have access to the immigration system so they could import unlimited amounts of people from a foreign country that have no connection to our genetics, no understanding of our history, no respect for our values, or any sort of comprehension of standards of personal hygiene. But hey, they have amazing in-group preference and won’t hire actual Americans, so at least you won’t have to work with them.

I never understood the “got your nose” game as a kid. I spent the entire age of three thinking adults were retarded because they were certain that their thumbs were my nose. Now, if they had been holding knives . . . .

Cheap Prosperity Or A Logistics Trick? Time Will Tell.

“They’re expecting transports, not gunships.” – Die Hard

Meat is murder. And cake is battery.

I was sitting around Stately Wilder Mansion the other night thinking about beer and steak. I like both beer and steak, so it was a pleasant thought. Then I remembered that a ribeye was technically more valuable on a per-pound basis than my liver, especially with the number of miles I have on it, and began to think about just how important energy is to, well, all of it.

Let’s go back to the steak. Chances are, this steak was raised in Texas. Or Nebraska. Or Colorado. I bought my last steak at Wal-Mart™, so chances are really good that it came out of one of the 11 beef packing plants in the country that produce half of the beef for consumption. Four are in Nebraska, three each in Kansas and Texas, and two in Colorado.

I still can’t believe they use that land to raise cattle rather than put in data centers.

Since Meat Loaf died, is he now Ground Beef?

Regardless, my steak probably came from one of those places. It was raised on a ranch, probably in one of those states, since, if you add in Iowa, and who wouldn’t, those states produce 77% of the beef in the nation. Then the beef is flung across the nation, as if from a merry-go-round whipping along at 37,000 rpm (40,000 kiloPascals).

This requires a lot of energy after the steak has so kindly and peacefully disassembled itself into its tasty parts and its leathery bits. Almost all of the cow is used and sold in some fashion, so there’s not a lot of waste. But it has to be cooled or frozen, otherwise by the time the beautiful steak reaches the counter, it won’t be very tasty at all and will smell like, well, not good.

The fact that steak could be shipped from Nebraska to New York for about $0.10 to $0.15 per pound is astonishing. And it requires fuel and coordination on a continental scale. Any disruption and the price of my steak goes . . . oh, my.

It’s already disrupted.

I once buried someone in the wrong hole. What a grave mistake!

The same thing occurs with that fish I bought at Wal-Mart©, except now we’ve moved up the chain to a global scale. It was caught off the coast of Chile, shipped to (checks notes) Vietnam for packaging, frozen, shipped to the United States for distribution, and then The Mrs. buys it because you’d never catch me eating fish while there are cows, chickens, and pigs still hoofing it around.

All in, this costs only $0.50 a pound or so. Oh, and 60-90 days. The fish has now moved thousands of miles.

Then, the Big Kahuna, oil. Let’s take a barrel of oil and transport it from Saudi Arabia to the United States, and then take it (as a gallon of finished gasoline) to Iowa. That can be done in good times for the astonishingly low price of about a quarter. Nowadays when the transport market is whacked because of Iran?

Still less than $0.40 a gallon. And that price whips that gallon of hydrocarbon halfway around the world.

We determined that the leading cause of dry skin in our house was towels.

Cool story. What does it mean? I mean, I know I’m not planning on eating fish, but cool story bro, but who cares? The world is a web in 2026, interconnected in amazing ways to create supply lines that no human could manage, and yet that are brutally efficient.

Efficient, as I’ve mentioned again and again, means vulnerable.

Purchasing is done at the margin. That’s economic nerd speak for, “Yeah, sure, but how much does it cost?”

If I look at taking a shower and water is $0.01 a gallon, I might sit there for half an hour until every part of my skin wrinkles up like Hillary Clinton’s face. If water is $10.00 a gallon, that means I’ll likely have an entirely different relationship with showering and start rubbing myself with small fur-bearing animals to dry-scrub the stink off.

The ducks at the park keep biting my dog. Shouldn’t have gotten one that was pure bread.

Right now, gasoline and diesel demand are dropping because their costs are going up in a painful way. This is impacting the cost of every physical good, from water to steak, and not in the good way. There are only two results from this situation:

Recession, or,
Inflation.

We have gone far beyond the time when politicians will allow a recession. At any sign of those, the money printer goes brrrrrrrrr. The result? Huge inflation in things like wheat in poor countries, which leads to revolutions and uprisings. People can’t eat, governments can’t govern.

Building a grain processing facility can be profitable. I’m hoping to make a mill by the end of the year.

The time, though, when other countries can soak up the money-printing recession plot armor seems to be passing, at least based on everything that I can see. This year? Maybe. Next year? Possibly. Six years from now? Almost certainly.

The webs that brought us cheap prosperity and ludicrous supply lines seem to be under stress. I’m thinking that opening up more data centers might help, just like a second dishwasher might stop a drought.

Sympathy Porn, Roots, And Body Cams

“I feel like Kunta Kinte.” – Psych

An unpaid internship is nothing like slavery. Slaves were given food and housing.

Body cams have undone tens of millions of dollars of propaganda effort spent during the 1960s through at least 2010. During that time period, thousands of hours of movie and television were spent on what I’ll call “sympathy porn” to describe emotionally laden content used to create sympathy for a group.

Roots is a prime example.

Back when there were only three channels in most places. Yes, three, ABC©, NBC®, and CBS™. Just as today, nobody watched PBS© because nobody needed a tote bag. ABC© decided to run Roots in January of 1977. I’ll have to note that the book the miniseries was based on was published in August of 1976, so it’s clear that the production of the miniseries started before the book was even released.

A quick check shows that filming started in May of 1976. And filming doesn’t start until everything is planned, so when were the film rights purchased?

1974.

The author of the book wouldn’t finish writing the book until November of 1975, yet his agent had already sold the film rights at least twice. The timeshare salesmen could learn from this guy.

I feel bad for my cousin in prison who stutters. Six months and he hasn’t finished his sentence.

Roots was an inevitable production, since it fell in line with the propaganda that had been everywhere since the end of World War II. The themes of the early films almost always featured a dignified, intelligent black protagonist, a white Leftist conscience figure, and a moral that showed the white people were wrong all along.

Most of them seemed to star Nonthreatening Well-Spoken Black Man® Sidney Poitier.

But that wasn’t enough because most people didn’t want to go see these movies. So, Roots. Let’s spend the equivalent of $40 million today making a movie to tell Americans they were rooting for the wrong side in all of those westerns.

The plan?

Make white people feel guilty about slavery that hadn’t existed for over a hundred and ten years.
Make black people angry about slavery that hadn’t existed for over a hundred and ten years.
Profit!

And profit it did, but the profits came from, well, there’s no putting a pretty face on it: lies and plagiarism. But I guess there are a lot of Emmys® to be won using lies and plagiarism.

The court found me guilt of using clickbait titles. What happens next will shock you!

Examples? Alex Haley, “author” of the book Roots lifted over 80 passages directly from another novel into his. He also stole plot elements and scenes. How bad was it? The judge described it as Haley having “perpetrated a hoax on the American public.”

I said another novel. Roots was supposed to be non-fiction, right?

Well, if you can make up non-fiction, I guess Roots is that.

Huge numbers of the people claimed to be Haley’s family couldn’t have been based on records. Haley must have just made it up. A journalist going through Haley’s paper and notes came to the conclusion that every specific genealogical claim that Haley made was false.

Other lies in the film are blatant and I’ll linger on it a bit: the film has a white guy leading four black guys into the jungle to go find slaves. The actual people who found and sold the slaves in almost every case were black people. Blacks rounded them up, blacks took them to ports, and then blacks traded black slaves for gunpowder and horses and whiskey. Or PEZ©. Or whatever blacks liked back then.

More historically accurate than Roots.

Had the black captives not been sold into slavery, they would have been killed and eaten, and if they were lucky it would have been in that order. But in the movie, to create the idea that a black person could possibly do anything wrong was against The Message. So, they had to have a white guy be in charge.

There are people who defend Haley and Roots as “symbolic history”, but I’m going to stick with Sympathy Porn, which is what it is. Symbolic history is the last defense, apparently, after the footnotes die.

Roots was a nine-hour attempt to create sympathy in a public that, in many cases, didn’t interact with blacks at all. By the time I was 18, I had interacted with approximately six total black people.

It got cold on Wilder Mountain, and the numbers of blacks were pretty low.

Two of the blacks had been teachers, and they seemed okay and treated me well. They were married to each other. Their daughters were about my age but not in my grade, but I recall them as being mean little snakes. The other two? One had been brought from Houston by his brother, who went to the local college and was an assistant football coach.

The brother who was the only black that I knew of that had ever gone to that school. And he got arrested for bringing a .357 revolver into school and then, poof, back to Houston. I guess. Maybe he went to medical school.

It’s like I told my spine surgeon, “Get back to work.”

Roots was aimed at people like me. Young, impressionable people who hadn’t been around blacks and would be susceptible to Sympathy Porn. The adults had seemed to be okay, but the kids were all awful, but The Message was that it wasn’t their fault, somehow.

I guess that’s the same idea that Gemini® has, too. I asked it about the rates of black violence being so high, and it says, “it’s shaped by socioeconomic, historical, and systemic factors, not inherent racial traits.” When I ask why the richest black community is more violent than the poorest white community it breaks and flat refuses to answer the question.

And then it tells me I’ve been de-banked. I guess it’s the same priesthood, but customer service is worse. Stupid 2020s.

2026 is a year in which everyone can see who is causing the violence on video clip after video clip. It’s the blacks. It’s not all of them, but it’s always them.

We’ve reached the end of Sympathy Porn being able to shape the opinions of people who have had their eyes opened by the reality of the footage captured by the body cameras.

Maybe I should write a book about this. Any bids for the movie rights?

The Cat, It Ate My Homework

Only had about 20% of the post written, so I said, hey, I’m tired and will probably use it next Friday.

How is this a win for you?

Memes!

For Perry Expedition enjoyers:

An exponential group of you will love this:

Who knew Ayn Rand was French?

What would the cryptid want?

And nothing has changed:

Home for the holidays . . .

The next two are for our British friends, but sadly they’re not in Arabic.

She and the article aged like milk.

Josh aged like Ted Bundy’s ex-girlfriend:

We need to import more of whatever this is:

This is the elite:

The ATF is getting crafty:

Wait until she finds out who sold the slaves into slavery:

I guess this is one way that India can show its true military strength:

“How dare you!”

They love me, they really love me!

Do your part to help reunite foreign families by assisting them to get their relatives home!

Oil, Oil, Toil And Trouble, Plus? Raccoons.

“No long, slow sleep of death embalmed. We shall burn, like the heathen kings of old. Bring wood and oil.” – Return of the King

AOC is introducing legislation to make him climate friendly and change his name to Vin Solar.

Arguably, the biggest machine humanity ever built is the hydrocarbon industry. Annually over half of a trillion dollars are spent exploring for it. Oh, sure, that’s what a Big Mac© will cost in 2036, but right now I wouldn’t turn it down. That’s just finding and getting it out of the ground. All in, with pipelines, ships, rail cars, and refineries, it costs about $1.2 trillion a year. Well, that was last year.

This year it will be more.

The killer is supply and demand. Less oil is getting on a boat and going to Rotterdam, so that takes it off the market. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve is nearing levels that some have said risk damaging the storage infrastructure itself, but it’s in Louisiana and Texas, so they’re used to the smell of oil in the morning. Smells like . . . money.

But what people miss is that it’s a finely tuned industry. It’s not like there are extra wells sitting around, waiting to produce. And, after Ukraine sent all those flying lawnmowers covered in C4 into refineries in Russia, that stung. It ended up taking out millions of barrels of capacity versus their peak refining capacity. That’s less bubbling crude being turned into diesel.

What would Jed Clampett do?

Thankfully, we also have Gulf War VII, Part 58, so that the oil produced is actually even lower than the capacity of the refineries. The IEA© (That stands for International House of Pancakes®, but in French, I think?) is guessing that things are rapidly falling apart when it comes to the amount of oil available and the fuel we can make out of it.

We have an oil tank. And its level is dropping.

Even when the oil comes back, we still need to figure out how to mash it into diesel, which won’t happen overnight.

What does that leave?

Demand destruction. Those are fancy words, but the short version is that the solution to high oil prices is high oil prices. Yes, I used to drink gasoline like it was milk back in the day, because despite trillions of dollars being spent to find it, drill it, pump it, pipeline it, smash the dead dinosaur molecules around so the T. Rex bones don’t get stuck in the bottom of my gas tank, gas was cheaper than bottled water.

Was.

Now it’s expensive, so people will stop drinking gasoline and diesel. And they’ll stop driving. And they’ll stop idling their cars so they use less of that wonderful fuel.

If you lock your girlfriend and your dog in the trunk for an hour, generally only one of them is happy to see you when you open it back up.

As we’ve discussed before, the poorer nations will be hit first, and hit hardest. For me, it means, well, nothing as far as my fuel purchases. I drive about four miles a day on the average day, so add the three and carry the two . . . that’s about 120 miles a month. At $4.50 a gallon and 20 miles per gallon, that’s, dang, complicated. It’s too complicated to figure out. You’d have to use multiplication or some other tool of the Devil.

As gas. Not as the economy, and it’s an isolated view.

But the cost of fuel is a tax that hits every physical object that is moved in space to be bought and sold. I know that now that if I want steak, because it’s steak and who doesn’t want steak, it will now cost more. It costs more to get food to the cattle, move the cattle, convince the cattle politely to disassemble themselves into Wilder-sized portions, and move their soon-to-be-grilled-ribeyes to my house.

What’s more Irish than potatoes? No potatoes.

If that gets too expensive, maybe I’ll have chicken. But for the person who can already only afford chicken, I think they have to move to something like mouse.

The short version is that demand destruction means people don’t buy as much of whatever demand is being destroyed because they can’t afford it. Demand destruction is just a fancy way of saying, “you’re all getting poorer, so learn to catch raccoon”.

There’s other positive news!

10 of 11 postwar (World War II, not the Franco-Prussian War) recessions were produced by . . . oil price highs that exceeded the three-year high. Which is right where we are. This didn’t happen in 2022, because everyone just decided to print money so we could build all the data centers we can eat instead of having a recession, so in my mind we just kicked the can down the road a bit.

Money printing is magic! Do you think they’ll stop now?

No. But what about oil. We make and export oil now. Surely, John Wilder, that will save us!

No, it won’t.

Surely that will never happen with the dollar, right?

I mean, sure, it’s nice that roughnecks will be getting some more hours in down in Texas, but that doesn’t help much when you’re a farmer trying to harvest the crop with diesel that’s now twice as expensive as you planned on. On balance, my money is still on this increase in oil prices resulting in not only demand destruction but salary deconstruction.

Salary deconstruction? Oh, nevermind that. It’s just a fancy name for people getting fired, or not getting hired. Raises will be down right at the time that people will be feeling more costs, and it will be harder to get a job. In the 1970s we had stagflation.

I wish this would be Epsteinflation, because at least then we’d never see it.

No, this will be Zendayaflation, because even though no one wants Zendaya, Zendaya is everywhere and in everything. Like the inflation we’re starting to see, small, mean looking, but you know that it’s going to grow and resemble a linebacker.

I bet when Zendaya starts counting carbs, she’ll go for a high score.

How do you get $1.2 trillion?

Just jam up the world’s biggest machine, and then create ones and zeros so we can spend them faster. The downside of that Big Mac© that costs only $1.2 trillion?

You don’t get any fries. And the burger isn’t exactly made of beef.

Ceasing To Be America

“I am truly sensible of the high honor the Congress has done me. But I tell you now, I do not think myself equal to the command I am honored with.” – John Adams (2008)

George Washington.

What a dude.

Washington was called up to lead the Continental Army. Why? Everyone knew him, and most people liked him, and if they didn’t, they trusted him. He had also killed a lot of French, so that was another plus. George took up the sword.

Then, after winning, and being the most popular guy in the 13 colonies?

He put the sword down. This wasn’t totally unprecedented in history, but the numbers of men with enough strength to put down power after having wielded it is a pretty small club. There is Washington, there is Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, and you could make the case for Sulla and Diocletian, but it’s still a pretty small club.

He attended the Constitutional Convention and served as the leader. As the delegates wrote the Constitution, they looked to Washington and wrote the job with the questions WWGWD? firmly in mind.

Why did Washington not take power? He believed more in being American than being the boss. Washington was later elected the first president, and that was after not campaigning, saying he’d rather someone else do the job, and wrote to a friend that his feelings on being elected were, “not unlike those of a culprit who is going to the place of his execution.”

He didn’t like the job, and had to be convinced to not take his name out of contention for his second term. But when it was the third time to elect a president, he made it clear that he was done. It wasn’t a prize Washington sought, it was a duty he wasn’t keen on.

Someone will mention the Whiskey Rebellion. Washington personally took the field during the rebellion, and did so to protect the country: without rules, there would be no future for the country. Of the two people sentenced to death, Washington pardoned both, and in fact pardoned every American who requested a pardon.

Two terms became a precedent, and George Washington became the model for an American.

The next real crisis the Republic hit was Civil War 1.0. In this case, I’ll argue that both sides fought out of a shared conviction regarding what it meant to be an American. Robert E. Lee, for instance, was Revolutionary War Lt. Col. “Light Horse” Harry Lee’s son. Light Horse Harry was friends with Washington and idolized him.

What was clear, though, is that once Civil War 1.0 was over, it was over. The North and South reknitted the relationship. Was it sometimes ugly? Yes. But Brigadier General Nathan Bedford Forrest III was killed when his bomber crashed in 1943, and Stonewall Jackson’s great-grandson’s fighter was shot down in 1944. Oh, and Patton’s grandfather was a colonel in the 22^nd Virginia.

We got over it. We were still Americans. We shared the same civic virtues, the same blood as the founding stock, and would pick up Washington’s sword when called.

So American that when it came time for World War I mobilization, Americans signed up. World War I was an entirely unnecessary conflict from a strategic American standpoint, yet they learned to bayonet for a foreign king against a kaiser.

How American were Americans? Until Germany declared war on the United States, Charles Lindbergh had argued that entering the war in Europe was not in the interests of the United States. After declaration of war, however, he was turned down when he tried to sign up.

Regardless, Lindbergh flew over 50 combat missions in the Pacific. As a civilian. Because? Charles Lindbergh. Duh.

The whole thing started to fall apart in Vietnam. It was a war fought poorly by leadership that didn’t want to win on behalf of foreign governments that were only notable when they weren’t being amazingly corrupt. Lots of brave men bled there.

Still, we could have “won”. But the media shifted away from national solidarity towards blatant GloboLeftism.

American idealism evaporated and was replaced by a constant drumbeat of American villainy started in the 1970s and continued through the 1990s. American soldiers being awful were shown in countless movies like Platoon. The “grab a beer and a chick and let’s party” music of the 1980s was replaced by the “I need a new antidepressant because someone was mean” music of the 1990s and the “I’ma gonna killa white man” rap.

The scene was set for the final betrayal.

9/11. The September 11 attacks and their aftermath represented the final era “American” enlistment. Former NFL player Pat Tillman quit his NFL® job to enlist following 9/11, but ultimately grew disillusioned with the war in Afghanistan. Despite a good start, it soon became clear that we weren’t serious about the war, at all.

A far lesser George, George W. Bush, said that “They hate us for our freedoms”, “Islam is peace” and “Acts of violence against innocents violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith”.

Did he ever hear about the stories actually in the Koran where their prophet ordered dozens of people assassinated? And also ordered the “peaceful beheading” of 600-900 men in Medina in one shot? Acts of violence are the fundamental tenets of that faith.

In a real nation, they would have been rounded up, and every non-European whose first language wasn’t English who was in America would have been shipped out on September 12. But no. We get W. telling everyone that if a person in the world will buy a Coke© then they’re just as American as you, bigot.

That was when we could see, finally, that America was no longer serious. We sent our troops out for a war on an abstract mass noun, terror. A twenty-year war that cost trillions and has (checks chart) only resulted in bringing in more foreigners who hate the horribly oppressive country that they fought to get in to.

Washington put the sword down to forge the identity of what an American was. At some point, someone has to pick it up to protect America.

Less Is More, Plus Camping Fashion Models

“The things you own end up owning you.” – Fight Club

The world spins on its axis. That really makes my day.

I used to be a Scoutmaster®. That was in the time before Scouting™ became fully woke, attempting to appease those who only wanted to kill it. I get it, I get it, those dollars were sexy and the BSA© was a little drunk and just couldn’t say no.

Still, if the BSA™ did it for the money, it’s pretty clear what that makes them.

I digress.

I think Scouting® had been a very valuable program. I know that the scouts in the troop I was the Scoutmaster© for turned out pretty well.

The secret, as far as I could tell, was to allow the scouts to run the program. I mean, it was called “Boy Scouts™” and not “Adult Scouts©”. The program wasn’t set up for the comfort of old men with checkbooks and a La-Z-Boy© at home.

I’m an armchair psychologist. Just yesterday I diagnosed my recliner with schizophrenia.

The first thing that I did when I became Scoutmaster© was to immediately stop the sharing of food between adults and boys. I had noticed that whenever dinner depended on what the kids cooked, the adults got involved because they didn’t want to eat awful food or crap.

Not on my watch.

The boys would plan their meals, cook their food, and clean up without adult intervention. This led to more than one tragic crime against the culinary arts, but I and the other adults always ate pretty well. The big lesson for me was that if I let them alone, they’d eventually figure it out. And if they burned dinner, they could go without or move to the next day’s lunch.

No one starved, but they got better and better at preparing and cooking.

Me? I got better and better at planning.

Don’t talk to me about fashion, it’ll just go in one year and out the other.

My first BSA© camping trip out was some 20 years after my teenage backpacking days on Wilder Mountain. I read the manual, and it said “be prepared” so my first loadout camping was approximately 300 pounds of gear, most of which was entirely unused for the weekend.

After four years and the BSA© abandoning all pretense at being Morally Straight, I packed for my last campout with the troop. My loadout?

A sleeping bag, cot, tent, toothbrush, lamp, folding chair, and book. Maybe there were a few other items, like extra socks. If it had been summer I would have taken bug spray.

I don’t often have international fashion models in my house, but when I do they manifest directly out of the bathroom counter.

The difference in the amount of kit was based on two thoughts: first, I’m going to a campground for a weekend, not attempting a solo summit of K2. Second, being away from the everyday luxuries of life was the point of camping. Over the years, I had determined that I could do without almost anything for a weekend camping trip.

Almost anything. I’m quite fond of air.

That was also one of the purposes for the boys involved in the program. They needed to learn that they could plan and execute a trip, and do without televisions and cell phones and fluffy mattresses and mayonnaise and soda pop for a weekend. That was one of the more enjoyable parts of the job, really, watching kids doing without and building competence and self-determination in a world that wants to make them helpless and dependent.

Sure, watching them fail again and again was hilarious, but failure was the point. And doing without was the point. And coming from a world of plenty, the boys loved the chance to make real decisions, take action, and live with the consequences.

In our current world, I think that we have created a dystopia where whatever isn’t mandatory is prohibited, and the idea of a kid going without a Friday meal because they burned it will make people seethe with anger.

If being a 23 year old Irish swimwear model has taught me anything, it’s that catfishing is surprisingly easy online.

Going to bed with a meagre supper is a consequence of bad skill, and the next time the boys took better care of their cooking so it wasn’t carbonized. To tell the truth, the carbonized noodles looked more edible than the chicken tartare. I mean, it was tartare on the inside, but blowtorched on the outside like it had spent an afternoon in Vulcan’s forge.

I still shudder at that thought, but, hey, I didn’t have to eat it. But in the future . . . ?

It may be that we will soon enter a time where the nation as a whole becomes much poorer than it is today. Poorer means less material wealth, and fewer . . . things. To be fair, the things I need the most don’t cost all that much in the first place. Books are inexpensive, and I have about 20 feet worth of books that I have planned to read. Poorer lands will have fewer dinner courses.

Economists have told us that we are much wealthier now than we were in the 1950s or 1980s. Okay. But I certainly don’t think that the average person is happier now despite being able to communicate with virtually everyone on the planet in an instant.

When I grew up, when the phone rang, we ran to it so we could answer it to see who might be on the other end of the line. As phone calls were expensive then, it was rare to get someone wanting to sell me something, so almost every call was someone reaching out, not something to avoid.

In the end, what makes us better is our competence, and what weakens us is being dependent upon luxury.

California, A Revolt Against Physics, And The Victor Davis Hanson Cycle

“In California, they’ll have warm weather tomorrow, gang wars, and some overpriced real estate.” – Groundhog Day

My friend cut an artery, and the first aid book said to apply pressure, so I yelled at him, “If you don’t stop bleeding right now, you’ll die!”

The State of California has, in its infinite wisdom, decided to change physics to what they would like it to be and picked a fight with friction. The new law creates the first rolling resistance efficiency standards for replacement tires. Yes. That. I know, I know, they said, “Join the GloboLeft, it’ll be cool baby, you’ll have all the weed you want.”

But, let them in to absolute power, and soon enough their inner Papa Stalin pops out.

The idea is a simple one: have California create the Tire Immigration and Control Enforcement Division (TrICE) and set them to regulating. Those will apply to nearly everyone. Oh, if you have a Lambo®? Yeah, you can still get grippy treads. Same if you have the bucks for an extreme SUV that actually goes to places other than the grocery store and Pilates and the wine bar.

What would you call a horror movie in California after they outlawed gasoline cars? “The Silence of the Lambos.”

The good intention is that it will force allow California consumers the ability to avoid pesky choices and to spend an extra $200 to $400 per set of tires in 2033. Now, that’s an “industry estimate”, which is suspect, but the “regulator estimate” is laughable of . . . $1.50 to $6.50 a tire. $1.50 a tire? Obviously, a lie.

Here, I’m for the consumer being able to choose what kind of tire they want.

Given that, it sounds like I’m a free-trader. Mostly? I’d prefer those tires be made in the United States, so I’m okay with a tariff if we decide it’s worth it for that industry.

I’m complicated.

Anyway, it’s not illegal to own these cheaper “non-eco” tires. A Californian in 2031 can buy them in, say, Nevada and drive back to California. The bet is that people will be too lazy to do that or gas will be so expensive that they’ll be out fighting to save their rebel refinery from BDSM-clad bikers so they can escape the desert.

My take?

None of that will happen.

What will happen?

We’ll have groups of illegal aliens opening up illegal car tire bodegas. Sure, it’s illegal, but they’re already illegal. They already skirt every law that they can.

These might be fly-by-night places where a vacant lot turns into Speedy’s ¡Ándele, Arriba! Tire Stop® for a weekend. Speedy will drive to Nevada, buy a truckload of illegal tires, and then sell them to you! This is not unrealistic, because illegals already do everything they can to avoid paying taxes, so sales tax would probably be optional.

Then, the hard-working illegal aliens would take the used tires and dump them. Probably at Victor Davis Hanson’s house. Then, Victor Davis Hanson would get a citation for illegally operating a landfill. Victor Davis Hanson would then go to court and plead innocent and maybe use the word “illegal alien” accidentally and then get charged with the Hate Crime of Illegally Discriminating Against Friendly Visiting Valuable Migrants by objecting to them using his farm for a landfill. Then, they’d send Victor Davis Hanson to prison, and give the land to the Friendly Visiting Valuable Migrants because it was land that was stolen by colonialists anyway.

Sure, sounds like satire, but it’s a reality already that California has a three-tiered justice system:

A carte blanche for the media/techno sect of the GloboLeftElite,
Actual arrests and jail and taxes for the Average Joe,
Another hall pass anyone else who isn’t white or Asian.

Victor Davis Hanson is clearly inside the Average Joe classification, especially since in California because he’s white and not a movie star, so he’s stuck inside the only classification where laws are actually enforced in California.

I’m not trying to pick on VDH, he’s just the one that’s written most extensively about the abject failure to apply the law to illegals in California. But he still lives there, so in the end the state may eat him.

Don’t let California know about the car that runs on dead leaves, if they find out they’ll mandate the autumn-mobile.

It is clear that California is headed down the road to a dystopian hellscape. Sure, this is just tires, but California seems to think that they are capable of repealing the laws of physics. Take, for example, that by 2035 California intends to ban the sale of gasoline powered passenger cars. This was an executive order by Governor Zoolander Newsom, the Plastic Man with the Reptile Smile.

Did he ignore the fact that Pacific Gas and Electric, (NYSE Symbol “GRASSFIRE”) can’t produce enough electricity for Californians now without causing the place to blaze up like a Cheech & Chong® fan convention? No, because they’re not allowed to actually build power plants, because that could cause carbon to go into the air.

Bad mayor, worse firefighter.

Instead, Californians just buy it from across state lines so carbon goes up into the air in a different state, so they can export carbon production and import smug virtue. And higher prices.

But to Californians, the disconnect between the cause and the effect doesn’t matter. “Something that’s been in motion for a decade makes my life miserable now?” is a thought that cannot occur in the mind of a California leftist because they are so inundated with the dopamine they get from their good intentions.

And the state gets crappier. But, hey, no one wants to defund TrICE, right?

There are many variations on this theme that we could continue with, from the state’s affinity for illegal aliens to their declaring playground sand a carcinogen (yes, they did) to not building a train but spending billions to not do it to letting tens of thousands of criminals out of jail just as violent crime is increasing in California cities.

What do you call a group of deaf people? I don’t know, but it’s definitely not a herd.

I’d blame it on incompetence, but the GloboLeftElite seem to have found a winning ticket in California with a modified Cloward-Piven plan to just make everything awful and blame it on someone else, say capitalism or Donald Trump or colonialism.

Each failure seems to bind voters tighter to them, while the Average Joes, to the tune of hundreds of thousands a year, are flooding to anyplace but California.

But, hey, at least they’ll have decent tires thanks to the only functioning institution left in the state: Speedy.